The Discovery Cloud: Ian Foster at TEDxCERN

24

May

2013

CERN is known as the current world epicenter of particle physics, the home of the Large Hadron Collider and thousands of scientists expanding our knowledge of the universe’s most basic ingredients. For one day earlier this month, the Geneva, Switzerland laboratory was also a meeting place for scientists, philosophers, musicians, animators and even Will.I.Am to share their grand ideas for the first ever TEDxCERN event. Among the speakers riffing on the theme of “Multiplying Dimensions” was CI Director Ian Foster, who presented his vision for The Discovery Cloud and accelerating the pace of science by bringing advanced data and computation tools to the smaller laboratories and citizen scientists of the world.

What we need to do is to in a sense create a new set of cloud services which do for science what the myriad of business cloud services do for business. We might call it the discovery cloud. It would be a set of services that take on, automate, and allow people to handle or outsource many of the routine activities that currently dominate research…I believe if we do that right, we can really make a transformative difference in how people do science.

You can watch a full video of Foster’s presentation below:

International Science Grid This Week also covered Foster’s talk and another given a day earlier to the information technology team at CERN. In that speech, Foster delivered a similar message about the need to bring advanced cyberinfrastructre to the “99%” of laboratories who can’t afford to build international data grids akin to what CERN used in its discovery of the Higgs boson.

“We have managed to create exceptional infrastructure for the 1%, but what about the rest?” asks Foster. “We have big science, but small labs. How do we deliver cyber infrastructure to small groups? They need something that is frictionless, affordable and sustainable.”